Ten days after leading the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Rebels to an upset victory over the Kansas Jayhawks, and just days before a Mountain West conference rivalry game against the Fresno State Bulldogs, UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka announced he had played his last game as a Rebel and would be sitting out the rest of the season so he could preserve his final year of college football eligibility to play for a different university.
College football players deciding to end a season early to preserve eligibility isn’t new. Players who suffer some type of injury that hurts their performance do it all the time. But Sluka wasn’t injured. He was embroiled in a contract dispute of sorts with UNLV. Sluka claimed that he had been verbally promised $100,000 to transfer from Holy Cross, where he had been Patriot League Offensive Player of the Year in 2023, to UNLV for his final year of college eligibility, but had so far only received $3,000.
UNLV denied Sluka had ever been promised $100,000, and made no effort to come up with the money. Instead, Sluka’s backup, Hajj-Malik Williams, went on to throw three touchdown passes in a 59-14 blowout of Fresno State. UNLV’s season was saved and they will almost certainly qualify for a bowl game this December.
But Sluka’s decision to leave UNLV in the middle of a team’s successful football season sent shockwaves through an already turbulent college football landscape. On ESPN’s premier college football show, College Game Day, Alabama football coaching legend Nick Saban not only decried the current state of relations between universities and student-athletes but even called for Congress to get involved.
“I’m not opposed to players making money; in fact, I think they deserve that,” Saban began. “But the way we are giving them money now, name image and likeness, is not really name image and likeness, because that is supposed to be for a marketing opportunity, which I think is a good thing. But we’ve turned it into pay for play.”
“I think there can be a revenue-share type of program in the future that would enhance the players' quality of life while they are going to school,” Saban continued. “But I also think that we have to have a system that still emphasizes education. You know, when these guys transfer, there is about a 20% less chance of them graduating, and we’ve got guys transferring three or four times. So we’re gonna have some really upsetting consequences of this down the road when we lose the fact that we are not graduating players and we are not creating value for their future.”
“I actually think there needs to be some kind of federal legislation,” Saban concluded. “You know, right now, every state has a different law about how you can manage your college program. But it is interstate, so there should be a national program.”
Saban has forgotten more about college football than I will ever know. And there is much wisdom in what he has to say about the future of college football and the necessity for federal legislation.
However, NIL and player compensation are not the only or even the biggest threats to college football.
Conference realignment is.
Being a student-athlete is difficult enough when you have to fly an hour between Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But thanks to Saban’s new paymasters at ESPN, now student-athletes have to fly six hours from Miami, Florida , to Berkeley, California , on a regular basis. It simply makes no geographic or academic sense for the University of California at Los Angeles to be in the same conference as Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Conference realignment may be bringing in higher short-term television revenue for ESPN and Fox Sports, but at the cost of destroying traditional rivalries, decreased in-person fan attendance, and, most importantly, hardship on the players.
Fortunately, there is a common solution to both these problems, one Saban mentioned: federal legislation. The failure to come up with a workable method of paying players and the failure to keep geographic conferences together stems from the same problem: antitrust law.
Congress has protected college football before
Like college football, for many years , professional football relied on ticket sales and not broadcast rights for the bulk of its revenues. At the time, each team negotiated its own separate television deal with each media outlet. That all began to change, however, in 1960, when the upstart American Football League decided to boost their television revenues by pooling their broadcasting rights as a league and then sold them to the American Broadcasting Corporation .
In response to this competition, the National Football League followed suit, pooling their teams broadcasting rights and selling them to the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1961. Unfortunately for the NFL, the league was already subject to an existing antitrust holding by a federal court that had previously upheld NFL rules restricting teams from broadcasting their games in the home territories of other teams in the league. The judge that allowed that restraint of trade in 1953, however, held that the full pooling of all the teams’ rights into one package was a violation of antitrust law and negated the contract.
Faced with no way to watch their favorite teams on television for the 1961 season, irate football fans pressured Congress into action and Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which gave an antitrust exemption to professional sports leagues including the NFL, Major League Baseball , the National Basketball League, and the National Hockey League. Importantly, however, that same antitrust exemption was not extended to college football.
Not that the Sports Broadcasting Act did not protect college football at all. For the express purpose of protecting the gate receipts for both college and high school football, the NFL was expressly prohibited from selling broadcast rights to their games on both Friday nights (to protect high school football) and Saturdays (to protect college football).
This structure left college programs like Notre Dame free to seek their own television broadcast deals with networks, and college football conferences were free to sign their own pooled rights.
For a number of decades, everything went smoothly until 1981 when the National Collegiate Athletic Association signed a deal with ABC and CBS, giving them the rights to broadcast 14 games each season but also restricting how many times each school could be featured on a national broadcast. The universities of Oklahoma and Georgia then sued, arguing that the NCAA agreement with ABC and CBS was a violation of antitrust law, and since the NCAA was not protected by the Sports Broadcasting Act, the schools won.
An NFL without an antitrust exemption
If you want to make sense of the current forces driving college football realignment, imagine that the Sports Broadcasting Act was never passed, and each NFL division could bargain for their own television contract. Some NFL divisions, like NFC East (which has the New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., markets), would be much more valuable than others, and their teams would earn much higher television revenues. Others, like the AFC South (Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Nashville, and Houston), would get far less.
But why limit yourself to just New York , Philadelphia , and Dallas when you could also add the Los Angeles and Chicago markets? An NFC East with the Giants, Cowboys, Eagles, Rams, and Bears would be worth much more than the existing four teams. Would this hurt the NFC North and NFC West? Sure. But who cares? That is their problem.
The NFL would never allow this because it wants to preserve competitive balance and geographic coherence for the league. But that is exactly what is happening to college football right now. The only reason the NFL is able to stop that is because of the antitrust exemption given to it by Congress.
The NFL also benefits from the exemption afforded collective bargaining agreements through labor law. Without labor law’s antitrust exemption, every player in the NFL would be a free agent at the end of every year, much like the chaos that currently exists in college football. The current framework of player-team relationships in the NFL, including the NFL draft, is only possible because of antitrust exemptions.
Some people have argued that, in fact, some college athletes have pushed for the application of labor law to college athletes. However, the student-athlete-college relationship is unique and would be a bad fit for labor law. If players were to unionize, they would be classified as employees, and they would have to pay taxes on not just whatever broadcast revenue they received from schools but also for their tuition and room and board. Every aspect of their college lives would then be subject to federal lawsuits. If a player failed a class and was ruled ineligible to play, he could make it an unfair labor practice grievance. Dorms, food plans, travel arrangements would all be matters up for bargaining. It would be a never-ending litigation nightmare.
It is time for a college athletics antitrust exemption
Congress could simultaneously fix both the player compensation and conference realignment dilemmas by granting college athletics an exemption from antitrust law. Very few people trust the NCAA, but the NCAA would not have to be the organization that acted for schools and students collectively. A new organization could be created, led by former student-athletes and coaches, maybe even headed by Nick Saban himself.
The details of the ultimate solutions to the player compensation and broadcasting rights problems are important, but there are many possibilities. The major football schools could all be pushed into a Big Ten with a geographically coherent East, North, and West divisions, and an SEC, with its own East, South, and West divisions. Or we could bring back the Pac-12 and Big-12 with something close to their original members and shrink the ACC, Big Ten, and SEC back to their 12-team sizes. There are many ways to expand television revenues while maintaining traditional rivalries and not forcing fans to travel across the country to see a conference game.
On the player compensation side, some type of broadcast revenue sharing with players ought to be workable, especially when paired with a limit on the number of times a student-athlete could transfer, as well as a guarantee of not just four years of tuition for athletes, but also healthcare expenses related to their time on the field. Student-athletes deserve to get paid, but they should also have some lasting connection to the institutions that are paying them.
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President Teddy Roosevelt once intervened to save college football from a movement to ban it in the early 1900s. Roosevelt felt the sport was not just entertainment, but was also a social good that helped turn boys into men. College football has become so much more than that today. At a time when so many Americans feel atomized from each other, college football breeds community, identity, and tradition in a way professional sports never could.
Unlike the Raiders, the California Golden Bears are never going to move from the East Bay to Las Vegas, and the University of Houston Cougars are never going to pick up sticks and move to Nashville. There is a rootedness to college football that Americans need more than ever. Congress should do everything it can to protect that.
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